


the hatching of the heart

by ProwlingThunder



Series: strings and things [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Gen, Hatching, Misidentification, Reporters, Unexpected parentage, knocked out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-11-09 04:30:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17994878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProwlingThunder/pseuds/ProwlingThunder
Summary: He stopped. Backtracked.The basket was still there. His rocks, not so much.





	the hatching of the heart

There were shards spread all over the kitchen floor of his bungalow. Broken fragments of drinking glasses and the plates he'd set up to dry the night before, though the drying _rack_ lay on top of them, miraculously unharmed. Or not so miraculously, seeing as that had been made out of wood and was a _bit_ more durable than the fancy dishware. He didn't think he'd stacked anything in a way it would fall, though...?

Dino rubbed at his face, tracing out the tentative boundaries of the destruction. It was _three am._ Too early and too late all at once; he had fallen asleep typing up a new article to send to the editor, which meant the sound of shattering glass had woken him up to drool and keyboard smash (but at least he hadn't managed to hit _send_ in his sleep, thank the Six) and a very serious question of whether or not someone had broken in.

Galdin Quay didn't have an active, _overt_ criminal population. The criminal element of Galdin Quay is nearly nonexistent, and consists mostly of people stealing one another's fish and, once, some poor man's boat. Well, thrice the same man's boat. By his wife, as far as Dino's been able to sniff out, to go and meet a younger man. Which had been a juicy story but would have destroyed four lives, and that wasn't what Dino Ghiranze was about.

(There was a much quieter criminal element of smuggling, the same as any ocean-front settlement, but Galdin Quay was a vacation town that ferried people to _other_ vacation towns in Accordo, and so it was a _very_ quiet element. People took vacations very seriously, and someone's ruined vacation was front-page news. But none of _that_ element should have any reason to cause a ruckus at Dino's place, never mind do it at _three am._ They were probably busy.)

He didn't bother double or triple-checking for intruders. He had left the doors to the sundeck open, and most of the space in his bungalow was open, leaving them little place to hide. If there had been anyone here, they were already gone. Now all that was left was to clean up the mess. He wondered what they had been here for--

He stopped. Backtracked a few steps, and eyed the fruit bowl on the counter, where he had tucked the fist-sized rock from last month's misguided hunt for the Zu's new roosting grounds. How something that big could go _missing_ for any length of time was beyond him, but even though he hadn't found it-- just a mess of feathers where it had been-- it hadn't been a waste of time. There'd been a nesting spot for birdbeasts, but in one of the nests he had found three fist-sized stones flecked with dirt. Washing them up had found them to be a very pretty indigo shade, but they had been slick under the water, so he figured they had been some sort of prank. He'd been too busy to do any research on what they might be, so he'd put them in the basket and left them there, hadn't even thought about them again.

The basket was still there. His rocks, not so much.

Dino tentatively lifted a broken shard of blue out of it, the width and length of his pointer. The inside was opalescent, glistening, slick, wet.

He blinked.

_Is this an eggshell?_

Egg _shells._ Plural. He imagined if he put all the shards together, he may well have enough for three vaguely egg-shaped things.

Out of the corner of his eye, something flashed in the gap between breadbox and butter-dish. The sound of tiny nails scratched across his countertop. He turned to frown at it, brain trying to piece it all together, feet moving without consent to go investigate--

Another skittering set of limbs vanished behind his icebox. At three am. He stared at it, utterly mystified, trying to talk his brain into processing it all. He really needed it to. It would be _great._ Honest.

Eggs. Two… somethings, one over there and one over here. Quick on their feet, like _mice,_ only not mice, definitely. Some sort of bird? No, not right, some sort of lizard, perhaps, he had never heard of a bird with enough motor control to move that fast right out of hatching. Which made sense, because avians and reptiles developed differently during incubation, and freshly hatched reptilians had fairly good instincts, hiding from a larger beast.

He was forgetting something, something important. He discarded the sensation and moved closer to the breadbox, deciding that the icebox would require too much effort for the hour. The skittering came back, nails against lacquered wood, and he thought he saw a shape behind the assorted jars beside it. The eggs had been decent sized, so the creatures that were definitely _not_ some sort of birdbeast couldn’t hide that well--

Glass tinkled from the cabinet in front of him, and then something-- something long and thin as a snake and pale in the kitchen light-- threw itself from his spare glassware into the open air in front of his _face._

Dino flung himself backward with a startled yelp, caught his pantleg under heel, and felt the impact of an unforgiving kitchen floor as it was introduced to the back of his skull.


End file.
